


eux de la brume

by scionblad



Series: sang et vin [1]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - The Witcher, Conversations, F/M, Flash Fic, Mild Gore, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 12:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15840993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scionblad/pseuds/scionblad
Summary: “Well, well,” he said. “I can’t say I’ve ever met a lady witcher before.”———While attempting to answer a witcher's contract, Marinette the witcher finds a wounded stray, with a trail of destruction behind him.





	eux de la brume

**Author's Note:**

> the AU that you never asked for but got anyway. (ain't august the big AU month? i've been noticing some trends.)
> 
> my dearest friend jen and i came up with this on a whim, fueled by our love of geralt of rivia from the acclaimed video game the witcher 3: wild hunt (it is a very good video game if you enjoy big open world RPGs; i heartily recommend).
> 
> if you know nothing about witchers, they're essentially monster hunters who, at young ages, undergo painful and often fatal mutation processes which result in superhuman strength, speed, and resilience. they are most often recognized for their cat-like pupils, their two swords carried on their back (one steel for humans and one silver for various mythical monsters), and their increased long lifespan. (hence aged-up characters tag.)
> 
> unrelated but if you care about me and my writing: i'm going to be out of the country for a good long while so who knows when i'll next post anything! thanks for being understanding and thanks always for reading and leaving kudos and comments~

She had picked up the notice pleading for help several hours after high noon, and arrived at the village at sunset.

As Tikki passed the first signpost, marked with the village’s name, her medallion hummed on her chest. She swung a leg over her horse and dismounted.

It was deathly quiet. The entire village smelled of blood, and only the wind rustling through the nearby grasses and crops could be heard. It was not even an hour until sunset, and she saw nary a villager in sight, out and about working in the fields and gardens around the village. Her medallion hummed again, the second vibration a touch more urgent than the first, and she stood still, taking in the scene before her.

Something evil had been here, she thought, her stomach churning. She’d learned long ago to keep the disgust down, keep fear dulled enough that it might sharpen her senses, but she drew her sword—the silver one—just in case.

Behind her, Tikki snorted and shook her head. Marinette reached back, stroked Tikki’s long face to calm her before loosely draping the harness over the branch of a nearby tree and slowly moving forward, one foot in front of the other.

The first body lay at the foot of a well in the middle of the village, slumped facedown against the lip, blood running down the stone wall. It was a woman, the dress made with coarse cloth, matted with sweat, and blood from the wound. Marinette knelt down, a tentative glove reaching out to the red stain on its back, feeling for the injury. Her fingers dipped slightly into a clean straight line of a cut, severing the nerves clustered at the base of the spine. A sword wound, she noted, with increasing interest. The villager beside her had a slit throat, and the one yet after had arteries in the thigh and gut severed, the blood emptied from his body onto dirt. The one beyond that, she saw with her stomach churning in disgust, a child.

No, no. Witchers did not care. They had no emotions. She turned her eyes back to the scene at hand. Bodies, felled, not by means that she had expected. It was strange. There was a leshen head in the barn—a trophy, surely—and some more dead corpses scattered about, reeking of blood and a human hand wielding a sword. A very skilled human hand, she might say, for every cut was precise, destructive, and deadly, as if a chaotic force of nature had blown in in a gust of cold, tempestuous violence. Last she knew, leshens didn’t wield swords.

There were, in fact, blood stains on the ground to accompany the unseen sword-wielding hand that had murdered all the villagers—not just the villagers’ blood, but a smell that smelled a little sharper. She put her face near it and sniffed. Alcohol… herbs… a potion, she realized with a flicker of surprise. The smell was strongest on a small metal object around the back of one of the houses—kneeling, she picked it up with a forefinger and thumb, and recognized the cut and material as similar to her own, but different.

A Witcher’s medallion from the School of the Cat. _Witcher_.

Marinette had not seen another witcher in nearly a decade. She wintered at the witcher’s stronghold in the mountains of the north only occasionally, much to Fu’s displeasure, but she found no need to retreat back into the hollow where she watched her friends die around her to monsters and potions and the unforgiving face of the mountains. It simply wasn’t necessary. Even in winter she could handle her walk on the Path fairly well. She had been around long enough to do her job well and charm enough men and women to earn a sizeable amount of money.

Though, she thought with sudden melancholy, turning the medallion over between her fingers, that did not mean her journey on the Path was not lonesome.

Without quite registering what she was doing, she followed the smell, letting her nose guide her, until she could hear, through the rustling of leaves, a quiet, panting breath.

He was hunched over, his dark leather armor slicked red with blood, maybe of his own and of his victims, a mass of pretty fair hair overgrown long enough that it covered his face while his head hung, and his two swords carried upon his back like she carried her own.

She approached, stepping deliberately, knowing he could hear her just as well as she him. They met gazes. She stopped.

For a split second, a tense silence heavy with the realization of what exactly the other was. Then his face split into a coy smile.

“Well, well,” he said. “I can’t say I’ve ever met a lady witcher before.”

“What did you do?” she asked instead, ignoring him.

He laughed at that. “Can’t I introduce myself first, milady?”

She sheathed her silver sword and drew her steel one. The smile did not retreat; it rather grew wider at her unspoken threat, but he began speaking all the same.

“I accepted the contract posted to kill the leshen in this village,” he said, leaning back as if he had a glass of spirits in his hand. “And I did so. Easy job. I brought them the head and everything. You know what they wanted to pay me?”

“I’ve little fondness for guessing games,” she said.

“Ah, milady has a sharp tongue,” he said. “Well, it was meagre. More meagre than you could imagine.”

She said nothing, and made no move to move her gaze.

“Twelve, if you must know,” he said without her prompting. “Twelve fucking crowns. A man cannot feed himself, let alone maintain his armor, his swords, his potions, his tools of the trade, with twelve fucking crowns.

“Naturally, I threatened them—if they did not pay, they might have upon their hands something worse than that monster whose head I held—and they tricked me, led me into the barn, grabbed me, tried to stab me in the back with a pitchfork.”

That explained the wound in his side at least. She dropped her gaze to the swath of stained red cloth under his hand. “Pitchforks are dangerous in close quarters.”

“I turned in the split second before and it missed my lungs,” he said. “Unlucky for them. I then drew steel and did not stop until every last human was dead.”

A chill ran down her spine, the reminder of the corpses she’d seen, the people they used to be. She met his gaze—strands of amber and gold and green around his slitted pupils—and did not breathe. “Women,” she said in a low voice. “Children.”

The other witcher smiled humorlessly.

“They were innocent,” she said.

“I don’t believe humans are innocent,” he said. “Perhaps once, when I was much, much younger. But no more.”

She studied him for a moment, feeling an acute sense of disgust. It seemed to be written on her face, too, for he leaned towards her, elbows on knees, a keen grin on his face.

“Does that disgust you, milady?” he asked.

Marinette stood up. “No,” she said. “I expected it.”

She reached in her pocket and pulled out the cat medallion. His grin shifted from wolfish to wry.

“Ah,” he said. “So you found that.”

He took it from her outstretched hand and glanced back at her with a quirked eyebrow.

“So what now, milady?” he said. “Will you not tell me to mend my ways? Lecture me like a child?”

He was ruthless, nearly cruel, and blithely crossed lines that she loathed to. But there was a strange something behind it all, wrapped in layers of thorns and walls and self-deprecating humor, a heart that seemed to beat in pain. Something, after all, must have happened for him to be like this. She had not lived almost a hundred years to be blind to patterns like that.

She sheathed her sword. “No,” she said. “I would simply rather you not call me your lady.”

“If milady will not tell me her name, I will simply refer to her as milady,” he said cheekily.

He grinned at her with only jest. The more she studied his face, the less she could tell of it.

But even she could overpower a witcher injured.

“Marinette,” she said. “They call me Marinette.”

“And I go by Adrien,” he said, pronouncing it the way they said it far south, in Toussaint, with the last vowel pushed up into his nose. The sound made her feel vaguely nostalgic—it had been decades since she’d heard anything that sounded like Toussaintois.

No, no. Never mind that.

“Nice to meet you,” she said curtly, inclining her head. There was no feeling to be done. Witchers did not feel.

“And a pleasure to meet you as well, Lady Marinette,” he returned.

“I’m no lady,” she said. “I was never granted a title.”

“Perhaps not, but I was raised with manners.” He shrugged coyly.

He was still bleeding and yet his grin was still an attempt at a jest, if not mildly stricken with pain. What an odd character, she thought with some amusement. She knew some witchers who had funny dispositions—Kim, for one, who always barreled into situations with a sense of bravado it was comical, and Ivan, who was loathe to answer to anyone but himself, though with the best of intentions—but here before her was a mix of pain and humor and emotion, and—dare she say it—perhaps, even a kindness.

But of that, she could not be sure.

She reached into her pack and pulled out a flask of green liquid. Adrien raised an eyebrow in recognition.

“Is that what I think it is?” His grin wavered slightly. “You mustn’t.”

“Just take it,” said Marinette. She tossed the flask to him, and he caught it easily, with one hand, uncapped it with his thumb, and took a swift swig. Then, seemingly in surprise, he held the flask aloft, looking at it carefully.

“This is”—he frowned, eyes flicking back and forth between her and the flask—“Swallow? It feels different from mine, I’ve—it feels stronger?”

“White gull, berbercane fruit, and vitriol,” she said in clipped tones, snatching the flask back from him. “It’s the strongest version I know of.”

He gave her an approving look, and she looked away. Kindness did not exist in witchers. _We don’t have emotion. We don’t feel._

The wound healed quickly, thanks to the strength of the concoction, and once it did, he stood up. They met gazes.

“Well,” she said. “I’ll be off, then.”

“Wait!”

She stopped. He stood, his leather armor still stained red with his blood where the wound had been, the veins on his face soft hazy purple lines, from the toxins in the potions, his unusually green eyes wild, his lips slightly agape, his blond hair ruffled all over, falling over his forehead, ears, eyebrows. It startled her, the intensity of that emotion, how feral he looked, the sudden nature of it all, like a rainfall that began pouring with the quick crack of thunder.

“You helped me,” he said breathlessly. “Let me repay you. I’ve never”—he sighed sharply, his hands fidgeting—“I’ve never met anyone who’d—who’d done that before.”

Marinette stared, feeling her own insides start moving with the same frantic energy in his eyes. “How?” she said slowly.

“Any way,” Adrien said. “I’ll—let me travel with you. The Path gets lonely, doesn’t it? I’ll travel with you.”

“I—” She froze. “You’ll what?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, shrinking back slightly. “If I’ve overstepped. I’m, I’ve never done this before, you know. This, friends thing.”

“Friends?” she echoed dumbly.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, quickly. “If you don’t think so, then, I’m sorry.”

Adrien sat back down, his hands reaching around for his pack, searching. She watched him withdraw a small object, wrapped in brown cloth. When the cloth fell away, it revealed a knife, finely made, the sheath a fine deep blue and decorated with a faint pattern.

He held it out to her.

“I was given this by someone I knew long ago,” he said. “Take it.”

She stared at the knife. Then she looked at him. It was hard to think clearly—why was it that way?—but it had also been a long time since she’d seen someone like her, someone with stains on his hands, literally and figuratively, someone who was as wild as storms over the grasslands but also felt with the heat of an Igni spell, cast quickly with her hand.

Perhaps that was it. The emotion, both numbed cold and felt hot, alternating, perhaps even simultaneous.

With one trembling hand, she took the knife, and put it in her belt.

“Come with me,” she said.

His mouth dropped open, the cat’s pupils in his eyes dilated. Then, just as quickly, his face split into a grin.

“But of course, milady,” he said. “It would be an honor.”

The moon shone silver light on them as they left the village, side by side. The air was crisp, and felt good when breathed deeply. The wind carried the stench of blood away from their faces, and for once, Marinette did not push away the warmth of emotion with the cold mantra that had ruled her life for nearly a century. Instead, she let it settle in her body, with all its tangled strangeness.

She was not alone on The Path anymore.


End file.
